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Weather underground

Amy Frappier, assistant professor of geology, has developed, with colleagues, a technique using stalagmites that may provide a record of hurricane activity going back 500,000 years. The technique, described in “Stalagmite stable isotope record of recent tropical cyclone events,” in the February 2007 Geology, relies on the fact that hurricane rainwater contains more oxygen-16, a lighter isotope of oxygen, than does other rainwater.

Stalagmites form on a cave floor when rainwater dissolves limestone in the ground above and the solution seeps down through fissures in the rock. Frappier and colleagues used a computer-guided drill to shave off a series of ultra-thin sections of a stalagmite from a cave in central Belize, with each section corresponding to a few weeks of mineral deposition. Then, with a mass spectrometer, they tested the sections for oxygen-16. Deposits subsequent to Hurricane Mitch (1998) and other recent hurricanes were found to have higher concentrations of the light isotope, with sections corresponding to the most intense storms having the highest concentrations of all.

Because the age of a stalagmite is easily determined, and some date back 500,000 years, a span that includes both the last Ice Age and times when the planet was warmer than now, it is hoped the new technique can provide hard data on the much-debated nexus between global climate and hurricane intensity and frequency.

Commercial message

In “From Tastes Great to Cool: Children’s Food Marketing and the Rise of the Symbolic,” published last spring in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, Juliet B. Schor, professor of sociology, and Margaret Ford ’07, then an undergraduate in the department’s honors program, survey what is known about the business of promoting food to children.

On an average day, a typical American child sees 27 televised food advertisements; during popular prime time programs, 41 percent of foods advertised, not including commercials for fast food restaurants, fall within the USDA’s fats, sweets, and oils category. Small wonder, say the authors, that of the 10 favorite commercials cited by children in a 1998 study, five pitched junk foods (Pepsi, Coke, Snickers, McDonald’s, and Hostess). In 2006, some 44 percent of the commercials shown on children’s television networks after school and on weekend mornings hawked foods. With aggressive marketing of processed snacks, the portion of children’s caloric intake that comes from meals is declining, and a 2006 report from the Institute of Medicine makes the connection: “There is strong evidence that exposure to television advertising is associated with adiposity in children.”

The authors cite a shift not just in advertising volume but also in emphasis, beginning in the 1990s, away from “intrinsic product benefits” (e.g., “taste[s] good”) toward cultural advantage, “the association of a brand with ‘coolness,’”—part of a “creative revolution” in advertising that began with adult products, notably cigarettes. (“The relationship between tobacco and junk food is not merely symbolic,” they say. “Since Phillip Morris acquired Seven-Up in 1978, tobacco companies have owned some of the nation’s largest junk food marketers.”)

Schor and Ford question the effectiveness of counter-advertising to encourage good nutritional habits—it makes healthful food appear “adult-sanctioned,” hence uncool. Instead, they recommend a proven method of fighting childhood obesity: reducing children’s exposure to food commercials by reducing their time in front of the tube.

Read more by David Reich